---
name: product-planning
description: Prioritize product opportunities and build an evidence-based Now, Next, Later roadmap with tradeoffs, confidence, and a not-doing list.
---

# Product Planning

## Boundary

Own prioritization and roadmap communication. Do not turn a score into an automatic verdict or make unsupported delivery promises.

## Required Inputs

- Strategic outcome, baseline, constraints, and decision horizon
- Opportunities, evidence, reach, impact, confidence, effort, and dependencies
- Committed obligations and technical or operational risks
- Audience for the roadmap and review cadence

## Workflow

1. Define the measurable outcome and separate opportunities from solutions.
2. Build an opportunity tree where evidence links needs to candidate solutions and tests.
3. Choose RICE, ICE, or qualitative comparison based on data quality.
4. Show inputs, ranges, uncertainty, and sensitivity rather than fake exactness.
5. Make the priority decision with strategic fit, risk, sequencing, and optionality alongside score.
6. Group selected work into outcome themes.
7. Place work in Now, Next, or Later as confidence horizons, not promised dates.
8. Publish audience-appropriate views, dependencies, a not-doing list, and review triggers.

## Output

1. **Opportunity and evidence map**
2. **Prioritization table with assumptions**
3. **Decision rationale and rejected work**
4. **Now, Next, Later roadmap**
5. **Dependencies, not-doing list, and review cadence**

## Quality Gate

- Scores expose assumptions instead of concealing them.
- Every initiative links to an outcome.
- Now contains only credible commitments.
- Changes have explicit evidence and governance.

## Reference

Use [planning-methods.md](references/planning-methods.md) for scoring and roadmap worksheets.